On the job people feel skillful and challenged, and therefore feel more happy, strong, creative, and satisfied. In their free time people feel that there is generally not much to do and their skills are not being used, and therefore they tend to feel more sad, weak, dull, and dissatisfied. Yet they would like to work less and spend more time in leisure.

Meditation does not involve trying to change your thinking by thinking some more. It involves watching thought itself. The watching is the holding. By watching your thoughts without being drawn into them, you can learn something profoundly liberating about thinking itself, which may help you to be less of a prisoner of those thought patterns—often so strong in us—which are narrow, inaccurate, self-involved, habitual to the point of being imprisoning, and also just plain wrong.

Burning Man, the meme spread, was a physical analog of the Internet, a place where every tendency, every subculture, and every idea in the world were all instantly, dazzlingly accessible. Mark Pesce, a virtual reality programming pioneer, saw the playa as the only real-world physical analog to virtual space. “I get to the playa in 1995, and I see an endless plain with pointy mountains impossibly far off—that’s a virtual world. If you’d been to a computer role-playing game environment, that’s what you’d see, everything built on it a human construction. It’s cyberspace.”